Well, the tyranny of masculinity and the tyranny of patriarchy I think has been much more deadly to men than it has to women. It hasn’t killed our hearts. It’s killed men’s hearts. It’s silenced them, it’s cut them off.
Interpretation
This quote criticizes the harmful effects of patriarchy on men, suggesting it stifles their emotional expression and well-being.
Eve Ensler's quote highlights the detrimental impact of traditional masculinity and the patriarchal system on men's emotional lives. Rather than solely affecting women, she argues that these societal pressures significantly harm men by discouraging them from expressing vulnerability and deep feelings, ultimately leading to emotional disconnection and suffering.
In practice
In a discussion about gender roles during a seminar on masculinity.
Dancing insists we take up space, and though it has no set direction, we go there together. Dance is dangerous, joyous, sexual, holy, disruptive, and contagious and it breaks the rules. It can happen anywhere, at anytime, with anyone and everyone, and it's free. Dance joins us and pushes us to go further and that is why it's at the center of ONE BILLION RISING.
Before cancer, I was obviously disconnected. I had a tumor the size of a mango inside me and didn't do anything about it. It wasn't like I didn't know something was wrong.
It's a weird thing about the truth: It protects you. What really makes you vulnerable is when you're lying because you're going to get caught. When you tell the truth, there's a strange relief that comes.
Why are women immobile? Because so many feel like they’re waiting for someone to say, "You’re good, you’re pretty, I give you permission."
Security is elusive. It's impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. People change us. Nothing is secure.
I've been involved in social activism my entire life, and I would argue that many people involved in social activist movements have done very little work on themselves.
If you say: I believed in God, I trusted God and He didn't come through - You only trusted God to meet your agenda.
It is in vain to hope to guard against events too mighty for human foresight or precaution, and it would be idle to object to a government because it could not perform impossibilities.
One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.
Being offended by freedom of speech should never be regarded as a justification for violence.
INCOMPOSSIBLE, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both - as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man.
But meanwhile time flies; it flies never to be regained.
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